John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [144]
At the time, I had no idea why Wayne was referring to Yakima Canutt, and I think Duke was unsure how much I knew. So I gave away nothing, hoping Wayne would give me more. And he did.
Wayne continued, “What your friend Mr. Cushing said was true. I don’t know for sure how long that goddamn Chairman Mao wanted me out of the way, but it turned out he did. I had an idea there was a Communist conspiracy, but I kept it to myself. Never wanted my family living in fear that anything untoward would ever happen. Thanks to Yak, some of his best cowboys and some men from the government, I was okay on American soil, so I never told my family. And if you ever meet Yak, you can get him to tell you what I mean.
“But out in Vietnam I almost walked into a sniper’s bullet that had my name on it. There were a few places I saw in Vietnam, and I can’t tell you where I was when me and the marines I was with had bullets whistling past our ears. I tell ya, when you hear the bullets whistle past your ears and you also feel the wind as they fly by, you know you’ve just had a narrow escape. I don’t mind admitting, this time I shook. Scared the hell out of me.
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“I thought it was just another sniper aiming at Americans, but this was one sniper who didn’t get away ’cos the marines caught the son of a bitch. Turned out he was some kind of elite sniper from China working with the Vietcong. I don’t know what kind of interrogation they gave him, but they said to me, ‘You better come and listen to this.’
“So I went with them into some hut and I have to say he looked kind of all right to me. He didn’t have any cuts and bruises, so I guess they didn’t have to twist his arm too much. And a South Vietnamese guy told him to tell me what he’d told them. He said something in Vietnamese, and then the translator said, ‘I was trying to kill you.’ I did that thing you see in movies where someone looks behind them to see who he’s talking to, and there’s no one there.
The son of a bitch meant me. So I said, ‘What the hell have I done?’
“He said that I was the big American movie star who his beloved Chairman Mao had said was the chief devil of the great Satan America, or some such Maoist crap. Well, I’ve been called all kinds of sons of a bitch, but never that. The word had gone out that I was in Vietnam. Seems there was someone who saw me coming out of the hotel in Saigon, who was a spy or something, and the news of me [being there] got back to Mao Tse-tung. He had promised a great reward for the man who killed me. What was so pathetic was this sniper said that Mao had promised that the reward would be great glory, but he also said he had heard there was a financial reward too, and this sniper needed the fortune more than the glory because his family back in China was so poor. So when he saw me, he figured he’d collect on that reward.
“Don’t know what happened to the poor bastard. I suspect he didn’t live to tell the tale. And if that sounds shocking, you need to know that those Vietcong were doing the most unimaginable things to our men. Things I wasn’t allowed to show in The Green Berets.
But I knew what was happening out there.”
February 1966 brought good and bad events into Wayne’s life.
James Edward Grant died, and Marisa was born. Claire Trevor recalled, “Marisa’s birth took the sting out of Jimmy Grant’s death.
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I mean, sure, it broke Duke’s heart when Grant died, but having a baby when Duke was almost sixty made him feel . . . I wouldn’t say young, but he felt that life was there to be enjoyed. He said to me,
‘Did you notice how the sunrise gets more and more beautiful as the years go by?’ And that’s what being a father again at such a late age meant to Duke.”
After Wayne’s tour of Vietnam, he agreed to help Bob Hope raise funds for the University of Southern California’s scholarship endowment. Bob Hope remembered the event just a few years later in late 1969 (when, as a messenger boy, I got to meet the